Who did you need to know to secure a top job in 18th-century France? Explore Hyacinthe Rigaud's portrait of Charles de Saint-Albin, Archbishop of Cambrai in this 15-minute talk. Meet the docent at the Information Desk.

Discover more about Richard Meier's architecture and the design of the Getty Center site in this 45-minute tour. Meet the docent outside at the bench under the sycamore trees near the front entrance to the Museum.

Collection Highlights TourDaily11 amMuseum Galleries, Getty Center

This one-hour tour provides an overview of major works from the Museum's collection. Meet the educator at the Museum Information Desk.

Explore the Getty's collection of 19th-century paintings by artists such as Millet, Monet, and Van Gogh in this one-hour tour. The talk may also include examples of sculpture, photographs, or drawings. Meet the docent at the Information Desk.

Collection Highlights TourDaily1:30 pmMuseum Galleries, Getty Center

This one-hour tour provides an overview of major works from the Museum's collection. Meet the educator at the Museum Information Desk.

Exhibitions

The Life of Art: Context, Collecting, and DisplayDailySouth Pavilion, Plaza Level, Getty Center

From the time an object is made until the day it enters a museum's collection, it may be displayed, used, and perceived in different ways. The Life of Art takes selected objects from the Getty Museum's galleries and encourages visitors to sit down and spend time with them, offering the opportunity to examine them closely to understand how they were made and functioned, why they were collected, and how they have been displayed. Through careful looking, what may be learned about the maker and previous owners of a French gilt-bronze wall light, for example, or the transformation in England of a Chinese porcelain bowl? Close engagement reveals the full lives of these works and why they continue to be collected and cherished today.

Photography has played a central role in Ed Ruscha's artistic practice, most notably in the photobooks he began publishing in 1963. Highlighting important recent acquisitions by the Getty Museum and the Getty Research Institute, this exhibition features a selection of prints and materials related to Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963), Some Los Angeles Apartments (1965), and Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966). Also on view for the first time are contact sheets from his shoot of the Pacific Coast Highway (1974–75), one of the many streets he has documented extensively since 1965. The exhibition offers a concentrated look at Ruscha's engagement with vernacular architecture, the urban landscape, and car culture. Co-organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Getty Research Institute, this exhibition is part of the initiative Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A.

The selection of drawings in this exhibition explores the concept of negative space—the unoccupied ground around drawn elements. It elucidates how artists such as Rembrandt, Boucher, and Seurat deliberately left areas of paper blank to create the illusion of light and form, using absence to evoke a sense of presence.

A new acquisition by the Getty Museum's Department of Photographs, Hearsay of the Soul (2012) is a five-channel video installation by celebrated German filmmaker Werner Herzog. It combines the early-seventeenth-century landscape etchings of Dutch artist Hercules Segers with recent scores and a performance by Dutch cellist and composer Ernst Reijseger, resulting in a richly layered work that is at once intimate and epic.

Throughout the Middle Ages, Christians were fascinated by stories about saints, who led extraordinary lives full of mystical events and miraculous occurrences. Saints were depicted in manuscripts experiencing revelatory visions and performing wondrous feats such as healing the sick or raising the dead. Even when their tormentors were performing exceptionally brutal acts—shooting them repeatedly with arrows, for example, or violently beheading them—martyr saints were pictured remaining steadfast in their faith. This exhibition, drawn from the Getty Museum's permanent collection, presents manuscripts that allowed medieval viewers to witness these dramatic narratives and venerate the saints as models of piety.